In This Episode: Neal Stephenson's latest. Downloading entire websites. Connectivity while travelling is getting easier. "Sign in With Apple", and the pros and cons and privacy of letting a third party like Apple (or Google, or Facebook, or Microsoft) serve as a single authentication service.

This Week's Hosts

Leo Notenboom, "Chief Question Answerer," at tech education site Ask Leo!

Gary Rosenzweig host and producer of MacMost, and mobile game developer at Clever Media.

Kay Savetz, web site publisher and Computer Historian at Atari Podcast.

Longer Bios on the Hosts page.

Show Notes

In the warmup, Gary discussed Neal Stephenson's latest book, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, which lead do a discussion of how it does (or does not) relate to previous Stephenson books like Reamde and Cryptonomicon. Leo discovers he already owns Cryptonomicon even though he's never read it, and now feels he must.

Gary also watched Terry Gilliam's latest movie, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.

Kay learned how to download entire web sites using WGET (see the twitter thread). He's also selling vintage tech stickers at vintagetechstickers.com. (Leo's got one on his laptop already. )

Leo talked about his cousin from The Netherland's latest visit after her trip RV'ing through British Columbia, Yukon, and into Alaska. Of particular interest was the SIM card she purchased before arrival that "just worked" whenever Wi-Fi wasn't otherwise available.

That lead to a discussion of how we each connect while travelling. The consensus was that none of us has done the SIM card thing, as Wi-Fi is almost everywhere we go. Sometimes it's just easier to pay the mobile provider to just have things work, also.

Gary talked about Apple's new privacy initiative with a Sign In With Apple button -- CNBC -- and how it really is better than the outwardly appearing similar offerings from Google, Facebook, and even Microsoft.

Apple is also pushing two-factor authentication, which reminded Leo of an article published earlier: SIM swap horror story: I've lost decades of data and Google won't lift a finger where an individual lost his mobile number due to SIM swapping, and then his Google account.

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